Best Free WordPress SEO Plugins For Better Search Engine Ranking

WordPress is undoubtedly one of the best blogging platform, and with the help of plugins you could add unlimited functionalities and features. Today, I will be sharing few best WordPress SEO plugins which are completely free, and will help you to optimize your blog for search engines. I will also share some of the alternatives, and will suggest which SEO plugin you should stick to. One major problem with SEO plugins are, there are so many options available, and it creates confusion for newbies. When ever you install a new plugin, make sure you read the complete description and use only which you need to use, and make sense. I won’t recommend you to install all the plugins listed below, until you know how to use them properly.

• Read: Must have WordPress plugins and uses

In this best WordPress SEO plugins list, I will be recommending few of the best and free plugins which are available from official plugin repo. In upcoming articles, I will do a detailed writeup on how to use these below mentioned SEO plugins. So let’s go on with our list here.

WordPress SEO plugins to improve Search engine ranking:

You must have heard that WordPress is SEO friendly, and it’s not completely true. But, when you compare WordPress SEO with many other existing platform, WordPress is far superior in terms of search engine optimised platform, and with the help of many plugins, you could take the complete SEO of your WordPress blog to next level.

WordPress SEO by Yoast:

This is so far one of the best SEO plugin for WordPress, as it offers great deal of control of your blog SEO. You might have heard of many plugins like All in one SEO, headspace and many others, but SEO by Yoast is far better than any of the plugin which you heard. Yoast is one of the well-known WordPress ninja, and his work with this free plugin is incredible. He integrated many of his existing plugins like Robots meta, RSS footer and many other in this plugin directly. You can control the over all no indexing/doindexing of your WordPress blog, and you can optimize single post for search engines using this plugin.

Configuring WordPress SEO by Yoast is quite technical, and a newbie might find it little difficult to understand every settings offered by this plugin. I recommend you to read this guide, which will help you to configure this plugin without any issues.

Google XML Sitemap:

To help search engine bots crawl your blog effectively, a sitemap file is very crucial. XML sitemap plugin feature is also available in above plugin by Yoast, but I find this plugin to be better and it gives more control for creating your blog XML sitemap. The best part is, this plugin automatically adds your new posts/pages in the sitemap, and it require to be configure just one. All you need to do is, install Google XML sitemap plugin, generate your sitemap> Submit site map to Google and bing, and forget about everything. A good practice is to add a sitemap link in your blog footer and in your Robots.txt file. Similarly you can useUdrina image sitemap plugin to create a sitemap for your blog images. You can checkWordPress blog sitemap here.

W3 Total cache:

You must be wondering why a plugin which speeds up your blog is doing in a list of WordPress SEO plugins. Reason is: Google consider loading time of your page as a ranking factor. There are many cache plugins like Super cache, hyper cache out  there, but W3 total cache gives you more control, and helps any WordPress blogger to improve the overall loading time of the site. The plugin offers cache features at many level (Page cache, browser cache, database cache), and you can quickly integrate it with any CDN network you use. The configuration might be tricky for first-timer, but once you have configured the plugin properly, you could see a drastic improvement on your blog loading speed.

• Read: How to speed up WordPress Website

Broken link checker:

Dead links are bad for search engines, and broken link checker plugin helps you to identify all dead links from your blog. It might not be very useful for a newly installed WordPress blog, but if you have an existing old WordPress blog, this plugin will simplify the process of identifying broken links and fix them with one click.

SEO friendly images:

Do you know you could get decent traffic from Image based search engines? Search engines like Google and bing, relies on Alt text in images to identify and rank an image. A good practice is to use a meaningful name before uploading image. For example, even if I add a WordPress logo image in this post, I have renamed the image as WordPress-SEO-Plugin-jpeg. SEO friendly image plugin convert your image name as Alt text, and thus put your image SEO on automation. You can also use WP smsuh.it plugin along with this to compress the size of image, and again it will help in faster loading of your WordPress blog.

Author hReview:

Have you noticed star-rating in Google search? If you are running a review based WordPress blog, star rating will help you to get higher CTR in Google search. Using Author hreview plugin, you can quickly add star rating in Google search based on Schema.org. This SEO plugin is not for everyone, but for bloggers who do lots of reviews articles.

These are many of few SEO plugins for WordPress which will definitely improve your over all WordPress blog SEO. Many premium SEO plugins are also available, but for now lets install these free once, and if you face any issues installing or configuring them, feel free to ask me via comments. If you wish to add few more WordPress SEO plugins, do let me know via comments.

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A WordPress SEO Infographic That You Should Not Follow

Infographic is one of the latest internet marketing trend to gain exposure and earn quality backlinks to your website. These days, every company is launching an infographic to take advantage of this easiest method of promotion. To create a great infographic all you need is :

• Great design
• A layout
• Stats-Figures and present them in a readable way

From a user perspective, an infographic works like a checklist and very handy for future reference. From a blogger perspective, it’s a free quality content which get lots of social media sharing and bookmarking. So in short, it’s a win-win situation for everyone. At the same time, it’s a blogger responsibility to confirm if the information provided into the infographic is accurate or not. If not, one should always ignore such eye catchy graphical image, because it’s as good as a shining glitter. When it comes to search engine optimization, no information is always better than a wrong information. Today, while stumbling the web, I came across aWordPress SEO infographic, which is graphically appealing, and I find it very interesting to share with you, along with a message. Let me share the WordPress SEO infographic which caught my attention, and made me write this post.

Now, you must be wondering what’s wrong with this elegant looking info graphic by Rightway Solution. Well, this infographic is an outcome of half baked knowledge, which can put you in serious SEO issues for long.

Those who have basic or more than basic knowledge of SEO can easily understand what this infographic is trying to say.

• Use WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin
• Use W3 Total cache plugin
• Use Social share plugin.
• Use quality content (Don’t ignore the branding and focus on SEO expert part)
• Disallow category and tag pages in Robots.txt .. Wait…..Wait….

Alright, this is where I stopped reading this infographic because it made me realize this infographic is just for the marketing purpose and serves zero value. Now let me explain in technical details:

Effect of blocking WordPress Tags and categories via Robots.txt:

Robots.txt file is a critical part of any website (be it WordPress, static site or any other). Using Robots.txt file, you control the crawling of bots. That means, if you don’t want certain part of your blog to be crawled by search engine bots (For example admin pages, database page), you do it from robots.txt. You don’t really use it for No-indexing of a content (Apart from certain situation). For noindexing a content, we use noindex meta tag, which is suggested by all major search engines including Google.

From official Google page:

While Google won’t crawl or index the content of pages blocked by robots.txt, we may still index the URLs if we find them on other pages on the web. As a result, the URL of the page and, potentially, other publicly available information such as anchor text in links to the site, or the title from the Open Directory Project (www.dmoz.org), can appear in Google search results.

Tags and categories archive might not be very useful for search engines in post-panda world (as it’s add into low quality pages), but they are very useful for user experience, content navigation and also for deep-indexing of your website. Now, when you block Tags and categories archive using robots.txt, that means you stopping bots to crawl those pages. Now here are few problem with this:

• Search engine bots will not follow or try to crawl tags and archive pages. This will hamper deep-indexing of your blog.
• If tags and categories pages from your blog are part of web-index, and you have added noindex meta tag to deindex it, search engine bots will never be able to deindex it, as they will not crawl the pages to see the meta tags.

In short you are hampering over all SEO of your WordPress blog, and you will end up hurting your blog ranking more rather than improving it, and all credit goes to one wrong SEO infographic. Since, infographic usually goes viral on social-media, you can imagine how many people might end up following it, and un-intentionally end up doing more bad than doing good for their blog organic ranking. This infographic is published on wikimotive, which is quote popular  blog and have a huge fan-base.

Point 6 could be useful only when you are quickly trying to deindex tags/categories page, and the process is:

• You block tags/categories archive using robots.txt
• Remove the entire archive directory from Web-index using Google Webmaster tool
• And once links are removed from web-index, remove those lines from robots.txt and use noindex tag.

Lessons learned:

I’m sure you must have heard “All that glitters is not gold”, and this holds true in the world of online marketing. A good infographic is not only judged by the look and design of it, but from the information provided on it.

• When it comes to SEO advices, never rely on an unreliable source, or a source which can’t reason out.

Most importantly: When ever you are making any SEO change on your blog, make sure that you know what you are doing, and what implications it will have on your blog. If you are unsure, it’s better to do nothing rather than doing something ugly. I have nothing against Rightway Solutions, but being a WordPress blogger, it’s my job to guide you in the right direction.  My suggestion to such infographic maker is, add value with infographics, don’t make it just for the sake of it. This article is intended to warn you against all such information on net, which can do more harm than any good.

Even if you are sharing this Image in Pinterest or Facebook, make sure you add comment which says “A WordPress SEO infographic that you should never follow“

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Download WhatsApp Photos to Computer via Dropbox

couch modeprint story

1. Download your WhatsApp Contacts
2. Print Files from any Mobile Phone using Dropbox
3. The Top Android Apps on the Google Play Store
4. The Best Apps for your Dropbox
5. How to Sign Documents Electronically Without Ink or Paper

A friend has a book publishing business and have customers across the country who sell these books. They are old-school businesses that always relied on paper-based forms and fax for sending orders but now that they have WhatsApp on their mobile phones, they write their requirements on paper, snap an image and send it via WhatsApp. On this side, the received WhatsApp images are saved to the computer, printed and sent to the respective departments for processing.The problem with the workflow is that there are quite a few steps involved after the WhatsApp image is received. Since WhatsApp neither offers a desktop client and nor does it allow integration with services like IFTTT or Zapier, the incoming images have to manually transferred from the phone to computer for sending to the printer. Is there a way to automate these steps? Yes.

When a photograph, or any media file, is received inside WhatsApp, it is automatically saved to the phone’s physical memory. The media is downloaded without you having to open the corresponding message (we are dealing with Android here, the iPhone version of WhatsApp may work differently).

Now that we know that the incoming image file is on the phone’s SD card, all we need is way to automatically transfer the file to our computer. That’s where Dropbox or Google Drive can help.

Download WhatsApp Photos to Computer

We can watch the Media folder of WhatsApp and as soon as a new file is added to that folder, it is automatically synced with Dropbox. MetaCtrl has Android apps for Dropbox, Google Drive and Box that can help here.

1. Open your Dropbox and create a folder, say WhatsApp.
2. Launch the DropSync app and authorize it to access your Dropbox account.
3. Set the Local (watch) folder as/storage/emulated/0/WhatsApp/Media/WhatsApp Images and set the Dropbox folder as the one that you created in Step #1.
4. Set the sync method as “Upload only” so that it is not a 2-way sync and only WhatsApp images are sent to Dropbox but not the other way.
5. Go to the app settings and change the Autosync Interval to 5 minutes (the default is an hour).

That’s it. Within minutes of you getting an image on WhatsApp, it will be sent to your Dropbox account in the cloud and since you have Dropbox running on your desktop too, the image will be downloaded on the computer as well.

Automatically Printing the WhatsApp Photos

The next step is to send these images from the Dropbox folder to your printer connected to the computer.

This isn’t difficult either. You can open this Windows Printing script on the computer and it will automatically send images from the Dropbox folder to the printer. A similar remote printing option is available for Mac and Linux as well.

Please do however note that this will download and print all WhatsApp images so you want to have a human layer that discards the non-essential ones.

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How to Save Tweets Forever in a Spreadsheet

couch modeprint story

1. Send Personalized Tweets & DMs in Bulk from a Google Spreadsheet
2. A Twitter Search Trick You Didn't Know About
3. How to Collect Email Leads from Twitter in a Google Spreadsheet
4. The Most Popular and Useful Google Scripts
5. How to Create RSS Feeds for Twitter

Wouldn’t it be nice if Twitter had an Export button? You search for atrending #hashtag, an old tweet or your brand name, and all the matching tweets would get saved in an Excel or Google spreadsheet. And the archive would update itself as new tweets are added to Twitter.Well, Twitter is unlikely to provide an option to save search results directly but here’s a simple do-it-yourself solution that takes 5-minutes to implement and it will capture all tweets matching your search term(s) and hashtags in a Google Spreadsheet automatically. You can use the tool to monitor tweets around any hashtag, learn what people are saying about your brand, track popular search terms and more.

The idea is simple. This Google Spreadsheet connects to Twitter through aGoogle Script and imports all the search results into the sheet. It will make this connection to Twitter every few minutes in the background and fetches any new tweets, if available.

Save Tweets Forever in a Spreadsheet

The Twitter Archiver is available in two editions – free and premium. The premium edition allows you to monitor multiple search terms and hashtags in the same Google sheet. It is significantly faster at fetching tweets, it saves location information (if available) and can even pull old tweets that have been posted in the previous 6-9 days.

Features	Free	Premium
Automatically archive all new (incoming) tweets	Yes	Yes
Support for advanced Twitter search operators like min_retweets	Yes	Yes
Capture old tweets sent in the last 6-9 days	No	Yes
Show seo-tagged tweets on a Google Map	No	Yes
Tweet Archiving speed	Normal	Fast
Save tweets for multiple search terms and hashtags in a single spreadsheet	No	Yes
Installation Manual (PDF) included	No	Yes
Support options	None	Email
Choose Twitter Archiver edition	Forever Free	Premium
Platinum includes all features of Premium plus one-on-one support over Skype, Google Hangouts and remote screen sharing		Platinum
You may make payments through PayPal or your credit and debit cards. This is a one-time fee and refunds can be requested within 12 hours of purchase.

How to Use Twitter Archiver – Free Edition

1. Click here to copy the Twitter Archiver sheet into your Google Drive.
2. Change the name of the worksheet (not the Google Spreadsheet) to an hashtag or a search phrase that you wish to monitor. For instance, you can set the sheet name as #MayThe4thBeWithYou for saving Star Wars related tweets.
3. Go to apps.twitter.com and create a new Twitter app. Give your Twitter app a name, description, put anything in the website field and sethttps://script.google.com/macros/ as the Callback URL. Save the settings, then switch to the Keys & Access Tokens tab and make a note of the Twitter Consumer Key and Secret API keys.
4. Switch to the Google spreadsheet and choose Authorize from the Twitter Archiver menu. Enter the Twitter consumer keys and save the configuration. Next click the Authorize Twitter button to connect the Spreadsheet to your Twitter App.

That’s it. The tweets will begin appearing your Google Sheets within 5-10 minutes.

In addition to tweets, the Twitter Archiver app also imports other data like the tweet’s retweet & favorite count and the tweeter’s friend & followers count. This data will help you filter out the spam Twitter users or figure out the most influential tweets from the imported data.

The Twitter Archiver sheet runs in the background and monitors Twitter every few minutes for new tweets. If you would like to stop the tracker, open the Twitter Archiver menu and choose Stop Tracker as shown in the screencast video.

Since the tweets are saved in a standard spreadsheet, you can easily export the search results in various formats including PDF, CSV or even publish your data set as an HTML web page (choose File -> Publish to Web inside Google Sheets).

Advanced users may try this technique to create JSON or RSS Feeds from Twitter.

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How to Extract Email Addresses from Gmail.

couch modeprint story

1. Extract Email Addresses from Messages in Outlook Folders
2. The Most Popular and Useful Google Scripts
3. An Easier Way to Unsubscribe from Mailing Lists in Gmail
4. How to Create Mail Merge with Gmail and Google Docs
5. Save Gmail Attachments to Google Drive Automatically

The Gmail Extractor program, as the name suggests, will automatically extract the email addresses and names of senders, if available, from your Gmail account. You can choose to extract email addresses from every single message in your mailbox or from emails that are tagged with a particular Gmail label (or folder).The extracted email addresses are saved in a Google spreadsheet that you may either download as a CSV file for importing into your mailing list, like MailChimp or Aweber, or you can use that raw list as an input for sending personalized email messages through Mail Merge in Gmail.

If you looking to create an email marketing campaign for your clients that are not in your Google Contacts but you have previously communicated with them over email, the email extractor program can help you quickly build such a mailing list.

Email Extractor for Gmail

The email extractor for Gmail is available in two editions – free and premium. The premium edition is more capable, it can extract names of senders, it can parse emails from the message body and also, the speed of email extraction is high.

Features	Starter	Premium
Extracts sender’s email addresses	Yes	Yes
Extracts email addresses from CC field	No	Yes
Extracts addresses from the email message body	No	Yes
Extracts names from message header (to, from, cc)	No	Yes
Email Extraction Speed	Normal	Faster
Installation Manual (PDF) included	No	Yes
Choose Gmail Extractor edition	Forever Free	Premium
Platinum includes all features of Premium plus one-on-one support over Skype, Google Hangouts and remote screen sharing		Platinum
You may make payments through PayPal or your credit and debit cards. This is a one-time fee and refunds can be requested within 12 hours of purchase.

How to Use Email Extractor for Gmail

Here’s how you can use the Gmail extractor to pull emails of sender’s from your Gmail messages:

1. Click here to copy the email extractor Google sheet into your Google Drive.
2. Put the Gmail label name in cell A2. You may use inbox for extracting addresses from emails that are in your Inbox, starred for just the important emails, labela-labelb for emails in label B that is a sub-label of Label A or say all for processing all messages in your Gmail account.
3. Put your email address in Cell B2. The program will send you an email notification here once all the emails for that label have been extracted.
4. Next click the Gmail Extract menu in the Google sheet and select Initialize. Grant the Google script access to your Gmail mailbox.

The Google script is now running in the background and, depending on the size of your Gmail folder, may take some time to complete. You may close the Google sheet and it will send you an email once the extraction is complete. If there are any duplicate email addresses found during extraction, the program will automatically remove them and will populate the column B with the unique list.

You can stop the Email Extractor anytime later from the same Google Sheet. Choose the Gmail menu and select Uninstall.

Extending the Gmail Extractor

Internally, the Google Script uses Regular Expressions to pull email addresses of senders from messages tagged with a particular label and exports them to a Google Sheet. Since the script needs to track messages that have been processed, it applies the “processed” label to these messages. You can also remove this label after all the email address have been parsed and extracted.

The program can be further enhanced to extract data from the body of Gmail messages and this include shipping information, order numbers, parsing legacy contact forms or even your PayPal emails.

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